{"id":527,"date":"2015-04-29T17:27:45","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T15:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/?p=527"},"modified":"2015-05-22T15:10:27","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T13:10:27","slug":"approaching-justice-democracy-in-beauty-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jumper\/2015\/04\/approaching-justice-democracy-in-beauty-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Approaching Justice & Democracy (in Beauty Class)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"columns\"<\/a>In last week’s post<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0I wrote about a\u00c2\u00a0lecture by Polly Carl<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0on the first half of Elaine Scarry’s monograph on beauty<\/a>, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and truth.\u00c2\u00a0This week’s post takes as a starting point Polly’s lecture on the second half of Scarry’s book, which\u00c2\u00a0focuses on the relationship between beauty and justice. From there, it explores the importance of beauty in a democratic society.<\/p>\n

How beauty presses us toward justice<\/strong><\/p>\n

Polly began her lecture by explaining that there are two enduring criticisms of beauty that\u00c2\u00a0Scarry seeks to counter.<\/p>\n

(1)\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The first criticism is that beauty distracts us from social wrongs. Scarry counters with the argument that\u00c2\u00a0seeing something beautiful wakes us up and inspires us to turn our attention to others. She writes (on p. 81) of Plato’s notion\u00c2\u00a0that we\u00c2\u00a0move from “eros,” in which we are seized by the beauty of one person, to “caritas,” in which our care is extended to all people.<\/em><\/p>\n

(2)\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The second criticism of beauty is that the viewer’s gaze is destructive to the object or person.\u00c2\u00a0Scarry counters this\u00c2\u00a0idea with the argument that when we pay attention to\u00c2\u00a0another being,\u00c2\u00a0both viewer and object come alive. She writes (on p. 90), Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0[1]<\/p>\n

Scarry also finds\u00c2\u00a0that these two enduring criticisms of beauty are fundamentally contradictory.\u00c2\u00a0The first assumes that if our ‘gaze’ could just be shifted away from beauty toward some neglected object our attention would bring the wronged object remedy; the second assumes that sustained attention can never be beneficial\u00c2\u00a0and always brings suffering to the object.<\/p>\n

Scarry addresses these two criticisms as the first step in her thesis that:<\/p>\n

… beauty, far from contributing to social injustice in either of the two ways it stands accused, or even remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Below is a video of a lecture in which\u00c2\u00a0Scarry outines the\u00c2\u00a0key arguments about beauty and social justice from her book. My points below are drawn from this videotaped\u00c2\u00a0lecture.<\/p>\n